That was very interesting and reflects on a smaller scale the place where I served my apprenticeship. Our factory was just outside Glasgow and we rebuilt Army trucks (with the occasional RAF & Navy job). The main brands were Austin (K2 ambulances & K4 recovery trucks) plus an assortment of Bedfords (QLs, OLs, OYs & RLs). Smaller batches of Albion gun tractors and weird bridge pontoon trucks also passed through. Our average flow was around 25 trucks a week. When completed the trucks were taken to Base Vehicle Depots around the country with the largest near Abingdon in Berkshire.

Seeing the attention paid to the bus front axle beams reminds me that a friend in the SS Jaguar world recommended a company in London who rebush front axle eyes. I had an interesting journey flying from Edinburgh to London to deliver my axle to this company. I wrapped my axle and carried it as hold luggage but I was slightly apprehensive about carrying this heavy package through Heathrow Airport because this was just after a man was shot dead for carrying a table leg!

Peter

"A man who was shot by police while carrying a table leg which was mistaken for a gun, was unlawfully killed, an inquest jury ruled today.
Harry Stanley, 46, a painter and decorator of Hackney, east London, was shot in the head and hand by police marksmen on September 22 1999. Two Metropolitan police officers fired the shots after mistakenly being informed that Mr Stanley had a sawn-off shotgun.

The father-of-three, who was originally from Lanarkshire, Scotland, was carrying a blue plastic bag with a coffee table leg inside, which had just been repaired by his brother Peter. He was shot as he walked home from the Alexandra Pub in Hackney."_________________http://www.nostalgiatech.co.uk
1939 SS Jaguar 2½ litre saloon

Hi
I may be wrong about this, but, the way I have read some of the bus enthusiasts' posts on other sites.
Because the overhauls of different major components took different lengths of time, LT used to remove chassis, engine and body ID plates so that they could reafix them in sets to match a particular Reg Number when the refurbished bus went out even though it was possible that none of those components had ever previously been matched together._________________Bristols should always come in pairs.

Indeed, components right down to con rods and pistons etc were all chucked in big crates, cleaned, examined and then used to build the next unit. No wonder those AEC engines rattled like a bag of bolts towards the end of their life. Same applied to all sub component assemblies, axles, B frames, brake gear etc. My firm did a lot of unit reconditioning for LTE and this was commonplace, despite manufacturer recommendations. Problems began to increase with vehicle complexity though as root cause diagnosis was lost on stripping and components could fail later due to abuse in previous life but made no sense why. This particularly when electronic items came on the scene. I had some tough discussions at Chiswick works about that but it made for fast reworking and an endless supply of usable spares which is how a bus could be rebuilt from scratch so quickly, and this kept the production line running at full capacity. Nowadays it would be completely uneconomical and LTE realised that invoking new methods looking at limited overhauls until Mrs Thatcher broke up LTE into small companies, deregulated the bus industry and completely ruined the whole industry, from which it has never recovered.